Check out the video and you’ll see what I mean.

As always, comments and questions are welcomed and encouraged.

The first being the January issue of Super Street for which I shot the 2011 Formula Drift Champion Dai Yoshihara at Falken Tire’s warehouse out in Fontana. I also shot a poster which was a bonus inside each issue and Discount Tire also printed out lots of them to give to customers and fans. Fortunately I had a pretty decent group of people helping out, including my favorite assistant Nate Hassler.

(Poster image)

The second cover was shot the Tuesday immediately following SEMA. I was totally wiped out, but the show must go on. This time I had the unique pleasure of shooting my own daily driver I lovingly refer to as Oliver for the cover of Project Car. If you happen to find it on newsstands be sure to flip through it as I also supplied a lot of tech in this issue in a writing style a little different from what you would expect to find in PC.

The third cover was a really fun shoot in Chicago with David from Touge Factory. The ironic thing was that I had shot Dai’s car (another 6666 Customs, Chevy LS V8 swapped S13 drift car) less than a week prior to this. It was a little strange shooting two cars that were so similar back to back, but I knew we would space them out, plus they both totally kick ass, so I had no complaints. It was nice to have my old friend Jaryd Neibauer along to assist.

You don’t even have to like running to think that sounds awesome. With the insane elevation changes at the ring they say every 1 mile in a car is equal to 10 miles on a normal road… so I can only imagine what the green hell would be like on a human body, but I really hope I can find out…

It was definitely a good day.

The specs, while not making a major leap from the D3, look quite good.

FPS is up to 10 from 9
MP is up to 16.2 from 12
ISO from 50-204,800 up from 100-12,800
Price is $5,999 up from $5,199 (I’d gladly pay $800 for an upgrade )

Considering how good the D3 already is I think these are welcome additions.

Then of course there’s the video. Nikon is now offering full 1080P video with complete AF/AE controls, which is pretty incredible. Not that I am super keen on video at this point, but should I pick up the D4 I will certainly dabble in it.

Regardless I would still like to test out the D4 and the 1DX (not to mention find out what the pricing will be on Canon’s offering) before making up my mind and placing any orders.

So I know it’s not exactly news at this point, but I wanted to take a minute to talk about Canon’s latest offering, the 1DX. I have to admit, this is the first time in recent memory that I am actually excited to try out a new Canon model. It’s almost as if Canon took a year to rethink what they were doing and instead of trying to offer megapixel supremacy as they have in the past, they took a look at what Nikon has been doing and is now attempting to beat them at their own game. Some of the newer additions like the dual CF card slots are taken straight from Nikon’s playbook, but I’m not complaining. Even some of these smaller details have kept me shooting Nikon for the last five years.

Anyway here are a few of the things I’m liking about the 1DX

- Full frame sensor: while I can understand why the 1DmkIV was crop, I don’t see myself going back anytime soon. Besides you can always crop down in-camera.
- 18mp: to me this is just the right size for this type of body. Anything larger and you might as well be shooting MF, not to mention more pixels = more hard drive space eaten up. This is enough to print a 2-page spread without enlarging and I’ve gotten by just fine with 12mp for years, although there have been times I wished I had a little more, so this seems to be ideal for my editorial workflow.
- 12-14fps: My D3 shoots 9 which is nice, but not as nice as 12 (or 14 for that matter). This spec really starts to make this camera look like a good all-arounder for both sports and studio work.
-61-point AF: we’ll have to see if more is actually better or how it stacks up against the Nikon AF, but hopefully it works very well.

Price will likely play a big role in the camera’s popularity but I will presume right now that in Canon’s eyes this camera is like a D3s and a D3x or a 1DmkIV and 1DSmkIII built into one (which it isn’t, it’s more of a compromise between them, although it’s a very good compromise) so I would expect them to price it accordingly. I wouldn’t be surprised if this camera comes in around $8k, but for me to consider switching over it would have to right around $6k. There are some minor things I don’t like about Canon (like the terrible thumb-wheel and their restrictive auto bracket) that I would probably be willing to overlook if this camera is all it’s cracked up to be and the right price. However I have a suspicion that by the time this comes out the D3xs or whatever Nikon comes up with next will probably be out and I’ll likely pick that up instead. Regardless I can’t wait to try this new system and see how it does.

Phil Hill from Leica Camera on Vimeo.

High Key photography has been extremely popular over the last several years, particularly in the advertising world. It looks shocking and simple but for those of you who have actually attempted something ultra high key like this, you know it’s actually very difficult. It’s also a subject of which there is very little information about on the internet (and what is available are horrid techniques I wouldn’t recommend to my worst enemy), partially because it’s so difficult to do properly and partially because most of the people who have figured it out don’t want to share the details. Before we get into the post production you have to remember the most important element of a high key shoot – the base image.

We all know that you can quickly increase the brightness of an image by pushing a levels slider across the histogram, but this doesn’t always make an interesting looking image. More often than not you have a really bright piece of shit, which is not what high key is all about. In order to end up with a really nice finished shot it’s important that you start with something that lends itself well to high key – the background being the most important factor. If you shot a white car on dark asphalt in front of a dark building on an overcast day, chances are it will look terrible if you try this approach. What you want is something with good range and falloff that is naturally lighter colored (like the sky and concrete in the following images). Having a darker car in a lighter environment helps, but isn’t necessary as the car will be retouched separately from the background. Anyway let’s get this puppy started.

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Here is the image essentially how it came out of Dino’s camera with some minor adjustments done in camera Raw. As you can see it’s a little bland, but not a bad starting point.

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The first thing I did was a few minor curves adjustment along with a channel mixer adjustment to bring the image up a little and add some contrast.

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Next I added a color fill layer set to total white, lowered the opacity and masked it off to create a haze effect coming in between the floor and the bleachers above.

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A few more channel mixer and curves layers start to create the bleached out high-contrast look. Worth noting is that all of my adjustment layers thus far except for one have been finely masked to a local area on the image. The ground is adjusted separately from the bleachers for example. Carefully adjusting each section of the frame individually based on what each area needs (curves up, curves down etc) is key.

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With the background coming along nicely we’ll shift our focus to the car. In a new group we’ll take the original image and mask out the body.

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A few quick adjustment layers and the car is now settled nicely into the background. The most important part is to make sure that your white and black points match or else the car will look superimposed. If you have poor eyesight or a crappy monitor you can always use the info panel in photoshop to get a numerical reference for your black and white points. There’s nothing more embarrassing than editing a photo only to realize in print or on the web that your black points are off!

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With the car placed into the background I decided I didn’t like how harsh the shadows were on the upper left of the frame so I added another low-opacity white color fill layer and masked it into the corner to cut down the shadows a bit.

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Now that the image is more or less where I want it, I’ll work on color. I get a lot of people asking me how I am able to keep colors really consistent across a range of photos when there is so much post work involved and the simple answer is I wait until the very end to adjust color. If you do a color adjustment early on, by the time you add all of your curves adjustments and what not you’ll throw the colors way off. For this scenario I created a custom gradient map using cool tones to suit the car and the winter event it was participating in. I then stored the map so I could copy the exact same color adjustments to the rest of the set. This is another important thing to remember – if you save your color adjustment you can replicate it again and again without guessing and getting “close”.

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The final image was just three minor curve adjustments away. You’ll hear me say the phrase “minor adjustment” a lot and if there is one thing I can tell you it’s to work a little bit at a time. That’s the difference between high-end retouching and internet plugin hack jobs. You can’t expect to make three global adjustments and have every image look great. Sure it might work sometimes, but more often than not you’ll find that different areas of the image needs a different approach. It’s building up lots of small adjustments one at a time that make a huge impact in the end.

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Here’s the second shot out of the camera. Since most of the concept is the same as the first image I’ll skim through this one a bit quicker.

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Since the sky was basically blown I pulled some clouds from another frame Dino gave us. There is a difference between high key and blown out, we still want some detail here.

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Start with my one-two combo of channel mixer and curves adjustments.

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Next I added a white gradient color fill to the background to create a faux haze effect and did a few additional curves adjustments while I was at it.

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Then the car comes into play.

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Key the car into scene.

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Color treatment and final adjustments and voila! You guys getting this?

I think that pretty well sums it up. Just use your noggin and be patient, this is actually the most difficult technique for me to learn to do consistently aside from drawing fake studio backgrounds from scratch (which is a TOTAL bitch). If any of you guys have any questions you know I’m happy to help. If you liked this post and found it informative please subscribe to my feed and tell your buds!

Until next time, party on Wayne…